Museum Provision and Professionalism

Gaynor Kavanagh, Gaynor Kavanagh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134830589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Administration des musées

Museums are public places where objects, images and memories are kept and shared. They exist in infinite variety and contradiction. They can be places of great excitement and great boredom, sharply insightful and hopelessly bland. Museums are anything that the political climate and the imagination allows them to be. No two museums are the same.
The papers which make up this volume give ample evidence of the variety of views that exist about museums. They also demonstrate that museums and museum professionals are moving forward with energy and conviction. This volume will be invaluable to students and museum professionals and will provoke them to consider museum provision and professionalism in all their forms.

Part 1
The museum: some definitions

1

Some definitions of ‘museum’

Timothy Ambrose and Crispin Paine

It is important to know exactly what we mean when we use the word ‘museum’. But, even so, definitions do not come easily and most need some qualification. The concept of a ‘museum’ is in a continuous state of development. It is modified by the politics of the museum’s situation, the content of its collections and the audiences it aims to serve. However, a number of what might be called ‘working definitions’ are in existence and these guide our thinking by reminding us of the fundamental features that distinguish a museum from other types of institutions and practices.

THE ICOM DEFINITION

‘A non-profit-making, permanent institution, in the service of society and its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for the purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of man and his environment.’

THE MUSEUMS ASSOCIATION (UNITED KINGDOM) DEFINITION

‘A museum is an institution which collects, documents, preserves, exhibits and interprets material evidence and associated information for the public benefit.’

“Institution” implies a formalised establishment which has a long-term purpose. “Collects” embraces all means of acquisition. “Documents” emphasises the need to maintain records. “Preserves” includes all aspects of conservation and security. “Exhibits” confirms the expectation of visitors that they will be able to see at least a representative selection of the objects in the collection. “Interprets” is taken to cover such diverse fields as display, education, research and publication. “Material” indicates something that is tangible, while “Evidence” guarantees its authenticity as the “real thing”. “Associated information” represents the knowledge which prevents a museum object being merely a curio, and also includes all records relating to its past history, acquisition and subsequent usage. “For the public benefit” is deliberately open ended and is intended to reflect the current thinking, both within our profession and outside it, that museums are the servants of society.

THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF MUSEUMS DEFINITION

‘A non-profit permanent, established institution, not existing primarily for the purpose of conducting temporary exhibitions, exempt from federal and state income taxes, open to the public and administered in the public interest, for the purpose of conserving and preserving, studying, interpreting, assembling, and exhibiting to the public for its instruction and enjoyment objects and specimens of educational and cultural value, including artistic, scientific (whether animate or inanimate), historical and technological material. Museums thus defined shall include botanical gardens, zoological parks, aquaria, planetaria, historical societies, and historic houses and sites which meet the requirements set forth in the preceding sentence.’

This paper first appeared in T.Ambrose and C.Paine (eds) (1993) Museum Basics, London: Routledge, p.8.

2

The Museums Charter

Museums Association

Most formal definitions of ‘museums’ stress the functional aspects of museum provision. Few are invested with any form of ideal or vision: the ‘doing’ predominates. Such definitions help us define the activities of museums yet rarely their perceived social, cultural or political purposes. Individual museums have redressed this by devising ‘mission statements’, that is, short summaries of their ultimate goals. In these, philosophy dominates over function, dreaming over doing, thinking over reacting. This is an important task. Arguably, there has to be space in museum work for vision and hope; moreover there has to be opportunity for the contemplation of horizons broader than the next acquisition or the reorganization of the stores.

In 1991, the Museums Association published its Museums Charter to act as a reminder of the factors essential for ‘the creation of a modern and dynamic museum scene’. This was aimed principally at opinion formers and politicians, but is an indicator of the concern currently held by museum professionals in the UK.

Ultimately we as citizens must determine the value we place upon one of the essential hallmarks of a civilized country: an educated and informed society. A strong and dynamic museum culture that is accessible and of benefit to all members of society is integral to this achievement. This principle should underpin national and local government policies for museums.

Museum provision should remain varied and flexible, allowing for the differing needs of every type of museum, whether independent, local authority maintained, co-operative venture, national or regional. However, the present patchwork system of provision is highly unsatisfactory. It fails to provide adequate support for museums and does not allow them to realize the full potential of their collections. A national duty of stewardship is implicit in the public’s right of access to the national heritage.

The Museums Association considers the following eight factors essential for the creation of a modern and dynamic museum scene.

Public right to museums

Museum collections are a fundamental national resource to which everyone has a right of access. Central and local government should take appropriate measures to ensure that no sector is prevented from enjoying this right.

Education

Museum collections represent unparalleled opportunities for education, recreation and inspiration. The full learning potential of all museums must be recognized and realized.

Protection of the heritage

Museums should be able to save the heritage. This requires realistic funding and an appropriate export legislation regime.

Safeguarding of collections

All museum collections should have unambiguous legal status, with clearly defined responsibilities for their management.

Caring for collections

Museums should care for their collections to a high standard and should have policies for their management and development.

Autonomy

All museum services should enjoy a high degree of autonomy, enabling rational priorities to be set for scarce finances.

Resources

All types of museums should be underpinned by a system of policy and funding, sufficient at least to maintain or enhance existing standards.

Training

Adequate funding and commitment should be forthcoming from central government and museum governing bodies to ensure training of a progressive and structured nature for all staff and volunteers.

The Museums Charter was first published by the Museums Association, London, in 1991.

Part 2
Thinking about museums

3

The museum as a staging ground for symbolic action

Sheldon Annis

There can be little doubt that museums are complex institutions and that there is no simple way of understanding them. In fact, they are better understood as places which give rise to a variety of experiences. The unexpected is the norm, and the best laid plans of curators, education officers and marketing experts can be creatively altered by the imagination and expectations of the museum visitor. Those who visit museums and indeed all those in whose name museum developments take place add a wonderfully subversive element to museums in any society. The joy of museums is their capacity to be places where people explore something of themselves, although this does not necessarily come about in the way the museum itself may intend.

Sheldon Annis has captured these often contradictory aspects of museums and by so doing touches on their extraordinary capacity and potential.

In recent years there has been much scholarly literature written on the concept of the ‘symbol’. A host of related terms—sign, signal, semiotic, emblem, icon, signans, signatum—have spread into disciplines, as diverse as anthropology, art history, linguistics, folklore, geography and literary criticism. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines symbol as ‘a thing regarded by general consent as naturally typifying or representing or recalling something by possession of analogous qualities or by association in fact or thought’. In other words: something which stands for something else, but ambiguously and with disparate meanings. What a symbol is not is an algebraic equation, where S=something else. Rather, symbols are ‘multivocal’ and ‘polyvalent’—that is, they speak with many meanings and in many combinations. They change with backdrop and grow with use. And it is precisely their fluidity, rather than their capacity to represent directly, that makes them central to human thought and action.

A museum is a kind of cultural warehouse. It is a place for things taken out of their natural context to be stored, reclassified and exhibited.

When objects become exhibits, they necessarily take on new meanings: they are transformed. The warehouse, among its other uses, serves as a linking place. The object-symbols twist in meaning between two worlds, the world of their origin and the world of significance created by display.

In presenting them, museums assure visitors that objects are valid and illustrative of larger frames of meaning. Museum curators, after all, are culturally designated to be communicators. By selecting and framing objects, they bestow legitimacy on them. Implicitly, the unseen curator tells the audience: this is the real thing, take this seriously.

Yet just as there is a gap between the world of the object and the world of the museum; so too, there is a gap between the world of the museum and the world of the viewer. Even though the visitor is assured that museum objects are praiseworthy, personal meaning remains personal. It is something that exists largely independently of the designer’s message. For the visitor, it is something to be found or created.

How does the visitor make his way towards a personalized warehouse of symbols? And what, if anything, does the capacity to associate objects with meaning have to do with the growing popularity and success of museums throughout the world?

The answer to these questions, I believe, lies in the museum’s character as an expressive medium. That, in turn, is a function of its physical nature. As a kind of text that projects symbols and is meant to be read, interpreted, or experienced, a museum has its own set of qualities. Unlike a film, a book, or a painting, the museum’s symbols are approachable from many directions (literally) and in an almost infinite number of sequences and combinations. The meaning of a visitor’s experience depends on choice of movement among stationary symbols.

Compare the museum with a play. In a theatrical performance the audience remains stationary while the symbols on stage move (‘act’). The pacing and delivery of the message is in the hands of the theatrical group, subject to the receptivities and sensibilities of the audience. In the museum, the situation is reversed. The ‘theatre manager’ sets up a sprawling stage with motionless objectsymbols, and the audience is responsible for its own ‘pacing’. In a fashion, each member writes his own script. The visitor travels in, about, and through a set of symbols, seeking to tie them together with associations and meanings—as if each visitor were author and star in his own play.

A museum designer normally conceives an exhibition as a dramatic whole. Many exhibits— evolution, the story of aluminium, the rise of Etruscan stoneware—are plotted as micro-dramas. However, as anyone who has ever visited a museum knows, one’s own thoughts and choreography rarely follow the script suggested by the museum designer. The private script need not preserve the didactic public seriousness, much less the conceptual wholeness. The visitor’s script is a more complex affair: disconnected, improvised and usually fun.

In thinking about how visitors distil meaning from the museum’s terrain and the symbols in their paths, it is useful to imagine ‘scripts’, or symbolic engagements occurring simultaneously at more than one level. These levels of object-viewer interaction can be thought of as ‘spaces’. Three such spaces—dream space, pragmatic space, and cognitive space—are discussed below.

DREAM SPACE

Dream space is a field of subrational image formation. In the museum, it is the field of interaction between suggesting/affecting objects and the viewer’s subrational consciousness.

Consider, for a moment, museum objects detached from their labels and the order that museum design has given them. As such, the museum is transformed into a container for patterns, shapes, colours and sounds. The visitor moves forward, and against this abstract backdrop appears a changing panorama of suggestive things—things stripped of their primary use and natural context but cleverly laid out to suggest other times and places. The viewer’s mind and eye subrationally seize upon certain objects that jolt memory or recognition and provoke internal associations of fantasy, desire and anxiety. That subset of objects marked off by the mind and eye delimits dream space.

Dream space is akin to the space created by expressionist painting. Take, for example, the Chagall etching, The Man and the Sentry. Here we see objects that are disassociated from real world relationships. Shape and line suggest rather than represent. The disembodied objects become symbols, or at least triggers. A man’s face (or a woman’s?) perches atop a horse (a smoking horse, a 20 SHELDON ANNIS smoking house?) from which marches a sentry (the same man?, guarding what?). A horse, house, and sentry in place of a torso; they rest on pulpy (male?) legs that are seated on a chair.

There is contextual disorder, but it is precisely the disorder that makes the work provocative. The viewer finds a dual pleasure: first, the testing for emotional resonancy with the artist, checking one’s own response to suggestion (is there a horse and sentry within me?); and, second, the intellectual process of synthesizing, second-guessing, and interpreting the artist and his symbols (was there a horse and sentry within Chagall?).

The symbols of expressionist painting are flat and frozen. The viewer can only stand before the surface, projecting himself onto it and testing his vision against someone else’s dream space vision. The symbolic landscape of the museum, on the other hand, is three- rather than two-dimensional. The visitor can move into, through and past. He can slow down images, speed them up, or hold them steady. The museum is experienced as a flickering of and among symbols. The eyes, the brain, and the feet collaborate to give velocity and direction to the third dimension. In museum dream space there is a flow of images and meanings—highly personal, sometimes lulling, sometimes surprising, more or less conscious: ‘I like this’, ‘I don’t like this’, ‘I don’t care about that’, ‘I know this’, etc.

PRAGMATIC SPACE

Pragmatic space is the field of activity in which physical presence rather than objects have meaning. The visitor himself is likely to be the main symbol in pragmatic space. The channels and paths he chooses may have meanings largely independent of the contents of the museum.

Take, for example, the holiday-maker as museum-goer. A trip to the Louvre can be a symbol for a trip to Paris, which in turn has personal significance in light of fifty previous weeks of routine and money management. The museum is experienced more as a conquest than a visit. Having heroically touched the four corners in two hours, the traveller leaves satisfied (if exhausted). The museum hangs like a trophy from his belt—material evidence, purchased in the museum shop, tucked securely under his arm. To have been there is a statement.

The opportunity presented by museum space allows us to indulge our self-imagery: here I am, connoisseur. Here I am, meditating. But most activity in pragmatic space indulges our social natures. An observer who sits at the museum entrance will notice that visitors from out of town are likely to make museum visits in groups of social equals (husbands/ wives, friends, tour group members); but locals almost always go in groups of social unequals (parent/child, teacher/learner, guide/guided). Social inequality generates a certain tension. Roles are brought into focus, and then brought to life by talk and movement. As diads and triads of social unequals move thro...